Trash Talk

The consensus view is that I should spend much of the next two weeks taunting Viper. This sentiment seems to include Viper himself, who claims it “feeds my fire” (so does methane, dude). He’s gone so far as to try to taunt me into taunting him by writing a weak-assed haiku about his unfortunate injury:

Run easy, in storm
Fast pace lifts rock of ages
Into shoe, heel torn

Let me fix that for you:

A rock in my shoe
Its edges tear at my heel
As well as my sole (soul).

Unfortunately, while I’m a middle-of-the-pack runner, I’m a back-of-the-pack trash talker. This goes back to the days of my youth – during the McKinley administration – when it was called “ranking out.” The exchange usually involved an insult by one kid, who would respond with “Your mother!” and follow-up with fisticuffs.

When I joined the Air Force, I discovered formalized trash talk. As a special ops navigator, one of my qualifications was computing how best to spread propaganda leaflets over enemy territory. Dropping heavily armed men or a BLU-82 on them is a better idea.

So before I taunt anyone, it would be advantageous to have something to back it up with. This morning I decided I needed a 5k baseline to tell me how far I still have to go. And the result was the standard good news/bad news.

The bad news is that it took 28:23 on the treadmill to cover the distance. The good news is that I deliberately ran the first mile in 11 minutes. Yeah, that was pretty weak, but it was either that or burn out early and run the last mile in 11 minutes – or worse. Anyway, that comes to an 8:16 pace for the last 2.1 miles.

Happy with my progress, but very far from taunting territory.

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